Film music, anti-depressants and anguish management - Philip Tagg

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6 P Tagg: Film music, anti-depressants and anguish management Ex. 5. Tonal accompaniment to (a) North: A Streetcar Named Desire (1951); (b) Deep Purple: Owed to ‘g’ (1975). (a) (b) For musicians and musicologists let it be known here, in parenthesis, that I am treating minor-[add]-6 (m6) and minor-seven-flat-five (m7$5) paradigmatically as mutually invertible variants of the same half-diminished sonority (ex. 6.). Ex. 6. Mutual invertibility of Dm6 and Bm7$5 Ex. 7. Wagner’s Tristan chord as m7$5 or m6 Like madd9, the half-diminished chord has a long history in Western art music. For example, John ‘sempre dolens’ Dowland uses it in such anguished circumstances as the Lachrymae Pavane (Flow, My Tears, ex. 8) and at ‘consumed Ex. 8. Dowland: Lachrymae (c.1610) with deepest sins’ in From Silent Night (1612), as does Campian to underscore the breaking of vows in Oft Have I Sighed (1617). The chord also features prominently, as both a Cm6 and an Em7$5, in the famous suicide aria from Purcell’s Dido & Aeneas (ex. 9). The verbal accompaniment to these and other English instances of m7$5/m6 is quite tragic: living or dying forlorn, broken friendship, disclosing shame, etc.
P Tagg: Film music, anti-depressants and anguish management 7 Ex. 9. Purcell: aria ‘When I am laid in earth’ (Dido & Aeneas, 1690) Just for the musicological record, I should of course clarify that there is nothing anguished in the Baroque tradition about a half-diminished chord in the middle of an run of sevenths anticlockwise round a virtual circle-of-fifths. However, we are not dealing with the chord in such syntactic functions but with its occurrence in highlighted positions, where it has considerable semantic value, for example: [1] as second chord after an initial tonic; [2] in precadential contexts, often in crisis-chord position about seventy-five percent of the way through a romantic melody; [3] as modulatory (key-changing) pivot chord. Restricting the Baroque part of this story to the works of J.S. Bach, the half-diminished ‘second chord’ turns up repeatedly in the first Kyrie of the B minor mass (‘Lord, have mercy’, ex. 10-11), as well as in the opening chorus to both the St. Matthew and the St. John passions. Ex. 10. J.S. Bach (1737): B Minor Mass (opening) → Ex. 11. J.S. Bach (1737): first Kyrie fugue theme from the B Minor Mass ↓
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Film music, anti-depressants and anguish management - Philip Tagg

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